Perpetual 'QE'

In recent days, numerous central bank bureaucrats have given us hints that another round of pump priming is more or less imminent. It started with John Williams, president of the San Francisco Fed who mused about 'QE without a limit'. The FT reported:

„The US will make little progress tackling high unemploymentbefore 2014 unless the Federal Reserve eases policy further, one of the central bank’s leading officials has warned in the run-up to a meeting next week where the option of “QE3” will be on the table.

The comments by John Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, show how the weak economy is pushing the central bank towards action to support growth.

[…]

If the Fed launched another round of quantitative easing, Mr Williams suggested that buying mortgage-backed securities rather than Treasuries would have a stronger effect on financial conditions. “There’s a lot more you can buy without interfering with market function and you maybe get a little more bang for the buck,” he said.

He added that there would also be benefits in having an open-ended programme of QE, where the ultimate amount of purchases was not fixed in advance like the $600bn “QE2” programme launched in November 2010 but rather adjusted according to economic conditions.

“The main benefit from my point of view is it will get the markets to stop focusing on the terminal date [when a programme of purchases ends] and also focusing on, ‘Oh, are they going to do QE3?’” he said. Instead, markets would adjust their expectation of Fed purchases as economic conditions changed.“

(emphasis added)

Mr. Williams, so the FT, is thought to be 'close to the center of gravity' on the FOMC. We take this to mean that he has the helicopter pilot's ear.

So if indeed the Fed were to embark on 'open-ended QE' that is predicated on developments in the vaunted 'economic data', or putting it differently, is dependent on recent economic history (a method also known as 'driving forward with one's eyes firmly fixed on the rear-view mirror'), what happens if said data fail to improve?

Will the Fed then just keep printing forever and ever? As an aside, financial markets are already trained to adjust their expectations regarding central bank policy according to their perceptions about economic conditions. There is a feedback loop between central bank policy and market behavior.

This can easily be seen in the behavior of the US stock market: recent evidence of economic conditions worsening at a fairly fast pace has not led to a big decline in stock prices, as people already speculate on the next 'QE' type bailout. This strategy is of course self-defeating, as it is politically difficult for the Fed to justify more money printing while the stock market remains at a lofty level.

Of course the stock market's level is officially not part of the Fed's mandate, but the central bank clearly keeps a close eye on market conditions. Besides, the 'success' of 'QE2' according to Ben Bernanke was inter alia proved by a big rally in stocks. Such increases in stock prices are seen as a spur to spending, as the perceived wealth of stockholders increases. In the view of Bernanke and his colleagues, spending is what it's all about. The central bank chief holds that we can consume ourselves to prosperity. It follows from this that one should also be able to print and deficit spend oneself to prosperity, but oddly enough, it hasn't worked thus far. A reason to revisit long-cherished beliefs? Not at all! We must 'do more' of what hasn't worked thus far.

Following an unexpected earnings miss by market bellwether AAPL, the stock market had a perfect opportunity to sell off, but went sideways instead. Mr. Hilsenrath's piece I the WSJ (see further below) may well have provided the rationale – click for better resolution.

The remarks of Williams were then given another boost by Sarah Bloom Raskin, who announced the the upcoming FOMC meeting would be used to 'debate the benefits of a new bond buying plan'.

According to Bloomberg:

„Federal Reserve Governor Sarah Bloom Raskinsaid the Fed next week will debate whether to begin a program to speed economic growth and reduce unemployment through large-scale purchases of bonds.

Another round of Treasury purchases “is something that will be debated in the upcoming FOMC meeting,” Raskin said yesterday in response to audience questions after a speech in Boulder, Colorado, referring to the Federal Open Market Committee. “It will be debated against the backdrop of the dual mandate” to ensure stable prices and maximum employment.“

(emphasis added)

We once suggested that the writing of the bureaucratese FOMC statements could be delegated to something akin to the postmodernism generator. Just put a collection of stock phrases into a computer program that then prints them out at random in grammatically correct sentences. Mrs. Bloom-Raskin already sounds as if she were connected to one.

However, the final confirmation that something is in the works came yesterday when Jon Hilsenrath of the WSJ penned an article entitled 'Fed Moving Closer to Action'. Everybody knows by now that Hilsenrath is the media mouthpiece employed by the Fed. Kind of like the Oracle of Delphi, only with greater accuracy. In fact, Western media have become like the Pravda of the Soviet Union. They are no longer engaged in journalism, they simply relay vetted messages from government officials. The astonishing thing is that they no longer even try to deny it – see this recent article in the NYT, in which it is openly admitted that in order to 'retain access', every word emanating from the presidential campaigns or the White House has to be 'approved' by the apparatchiks before it sees print. Anything even remotely controversial is duly blotted out. These days, if you really want the truth ('pravda' ironically is the Russian word for 'truth'), you apparently actually have to watch Russian TV stations (such as RT) and read Russian newspapers.

Anyway, Hilsenrath writes:

„Federal Reserve officials, impatient with the economy's sluggish growth and high unemployment, are moving closer to taking new steps to spur activity and hiring.

Since their June policy meeting, officials have made clear—in interviews, speeches and testimony to Congress—that they find the current state of the economy unacceptable. Many officials appear increasingly inclined to move unless they see evidence soon that activity is picking up on its own.

Amid the recent wave of disappointing economic news, conversation inside the Fed has turned more intensely toward the questions of how and when to move. Central bank officials could take new steps at their meeting next week, July 31 and Aug. 1, though they might wait until their September meeting to accumulate more information on the pace of growth and job gains before deciding whether to act.

Fed officials could take some actions in combination or one after another. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, in testimony to Congress last week, listed several options under consideration, including a new program of buying mortgage-backed or Treasury securities, new commitments to keep short-term interest rates near zero beyond 2014 or an effort to push already-low benchmark short-term interest rates even lower.“

(emphasis added)

It seems pretty clear from all this that mortgage backed bonds will be the vehicle of choice (see also comments by Alan Blinder in an op-ed at the WSJ, were he discusses the methods the Fed could use to get bank credit inflation going again). This is probably the preferred option because of the perceived shortage of highly rated collateral in the market. Moreover, it doesn't smack so much of the Fed financing the government, even though technically speaking it only ever buys already existing treasury debt from third parties – albeit sometimes within days of it coming into existence.

To the extent that the Fed buys securities from non-banks, deposit money in the system will increase directly. If it buys securities only from banks, it may well end up mainly increasing excess bank reserves deposited at the Fed. However, banks are avid buyers of treasuries themselves, so the funds do indirectly tend to support government spending (it is easy for fractionally reserved banks sitting on a mountain of excess reserves to create deposits in favor of the government).

Given that the only goal of more 'QE' can be to goose the money supply (failing that, it would have zero effect), the question should be: is there too little money in the economy? Judge for yourself:

The US broad true money supply TMS-2, via Michael Pollaro. It has increased from $5.3 trillion at the beginning of 2008 to $8.719 trillion as of the end of June 2012 – click for better resolution.

Of course the above is a bit of a trick question. The money supply can never be 'too small'. Any size of money supply will be as good as any other to render the services money is supposed to render. Numbers in accounts are really meaningless per se – it is not important how much money there is, but what it can buy. Today, a dollar buys 97% fewer goods and services (a rough estimate) than 100 years ago. Evidently if things that cost $100 today were to cost $3 as they did in the year of the Fed's founding, we could make do with a far smaller money supply.

Increasing the money supply however always has ill effects, even though a temporary 'sugar high' for the economy can often be bought that way. If increasing the money supply were a good thing, then everybody should be allowed to contribute to the exercise, since one can never have enough of a good thing. We should all have the right to run our private printing presses – after all, what difference can it possible make whether the Fed prints the money or the commercial banks create new deposits, or everybody gets in on the act? If additions to the money supply are desirable, why should Joe Six-Pack's privately printed notes not also be desirable?

It is by posing such simple questions that one can immediately unmask the absurdity of the Fed's activities.

What Printing Money Does – The Credit Cycle versus Government Directed Inflation

Of course money is not 'neutral'. If the Fed were to increase everyone's money holdings pro rata by the exact same percentage on the same day, then it would be clear to all that it would make no difference – nobody would be any richer, and merchants would raise all prices by this exact percentage on that very day. We would expect them to, and they would be foolish not to do it.

However, money enters the economy at discrete points. This has redistributive effects, as the early receivers will profit at the expense of later receivers. It also means that a price revolution will inevitably occur: it is irrelevant whether 'CPI' rises or not. Prices will be altered relative to one another. Once the money has percolated through the economy, the price structure will be different from what it was before and from what it would have been absent the inflation.

If commercial banks create new deposits by granting credit, then to the extent that such credit creation is new money from thin air 'backed' by fractional reserves, we will experience the usual trade cycle: factors of production will be drawn to higher order goods production at the expense of the middle and later stages of the production structure and once the boom is underway, consumption will increase as illusory accounting profits are spent. Capital will be ultimately be consumed. The inter-temporal coordination between production and consumption will be disturbed, as the fiduciary media that come to the loan market lower interest rates and create the false impression that the pool of voluntary real savings is larger than it really is. More distant stages will tend to be added to production structure, i.e. very long term investment projects that suddenly appear to be profitable. However, the real resources to bring these projects to fruition do not really exist – eventually many of them will have to be abandoned (countless ghost towns in Spain are testament to this fact). It will also invariably turn out that businesses have invested in the wrong lines. Whether they disagree with actual consumer demand or must be abandoned for lack of complementary capital, countless malinvestments will inevitably be unmasked when the boom ends.

The case of a central bank and government directed inflation is slightly different. If banks lend to money from thin air to businesses and consumers, the market interest rate will tend to be depressed below the societal rate of time preference. The business cycle briefly outlined above will result. Since a feature of the business cycle is that a production structure is erected the length of which can not be supported by the economy's pool of real funding – a production structure that ties up more consumer goods than it releases – we speak of intertemporal discoordination. The discoordination is between consumption and production schedules: had consumers really saved more, then it would be clear that they are abstaining from consumption in the present with the aim of being able to consume more in the future. But the market interest rate is falsified. It only appears as though they were abstaining from present consumption, in reality their desire to save and thus their consumption schedule has not changed. However, the lower interest rate interferes with production – a lengthened production structure will require more time to produce consumer goods. If sufficient savings were indeed available, it would eventually produce more consumer goods than previously. In an artificial credit cycle, the expected future consumer demand will never materialize.

If banks lend directly to the government (a process which the buying of securities by the Fed aids and abets), then the government spends those funds directly. It does not offer them as loans to businesses, it spends them on government consumption. This will also distort the production structure, but the disturbance will be an intra-temporal discoordination. Certain business branches that are favored by government largesse will see rising prices and will be induced to expand. The result will once again be a production structure that fundamentally disagrees with the wishes of consumers. A good example of this are the failed investments in 'green energy' the government has undertaken in the course of its stimulus program. These projects certainly squander scarce resources that could be put to better use in satisfying actual consumer wants. Profit and loss accounting for such projects is a fiction. We have discussed examples of these failed projects in more detail here (scroll down to 'Stimulus Fail').

“Legally the bank becomes the treasury's creditor. In fact the whole transaction amounts to fiat money inflation. The additional fiduciary media enter the market by way of the treasury as payment for various items of government expenditure. It is this additional government demand that incites business to expand its activities. The issuance of these newly created fiat money sums does not directly interfere with the gross market rate of interest, whatever the rate of interest may be which the government pays to the bank. They affect the loan market and the gross market rate of interest, apart from the emergence of a positive price premium, only if a part of them reaches the loan market at a time at which their effects upon commodity prices and wage rates have not yet been consummated.”

An explanatory note: the 'price premium' is the premium on interest rates that accounts for the expected future decline in money's purchasing power. At the moment this price premium is very low, as economic uncertainty has led to an increase in the demand for money (cash holdings). It is e.g. well known that corporations hold large amounts of cash. At the same time, the inflationary policy is still widely thought to be a temporary phenomenon. 'Inflation' in the sense of a rise in the 'general price level' as measured by CPI is held to be a phenomenon that the central bank has 'under control'. It remains to be seen whether this faith persists if 'QE' becomes open-ended.

The ECB's and BoE's Failure to Inflate The Money Supply

Contrary to the Fed, both the BoE an the ECB have been unable to spur money supply inflation since the crisis in the euro area began. Banks are under pressure and are calling in loans in an attempt to shrink their overleveraged balance sheets. Moreover, in the euro area, they find themselves constrained in making loans to governments that are themselves at risk of insolvency and can no longer print their own money. These governments in turn are forced to adopt austerity measures, so there is no way for additional money to enter the economy in the absence of private sector credit expansion and concurrent reductions in government spending.

Countries like Spain that have experienced massive credit booms and malinvestment orgies prior to the onset of the crisis are therefore feeling the full brunt of the contraction that follows on the heels of such a bubble. Unfortunately this has so far not meant that unsound credit was liquidated. The euro-system still allows for the surreptitious funding of de facto insolvent banks via ELA (emergency liquidity assistance) and moreover enables deposit flight and current account deficits that are financed with central bank money through TARGET-2. This blunts the severity of the economic downturn only marginally, but it clearly delays its resolution.

Although ECB board members including Mario Draghi himself often reiterate that they 'see no risk of deflation' for the euro area, the risk is far greater in the euro area than in the US. They refer to prices and not the money supply, but as we have often pointed out, money supply inflation has slowed to a crawl after the initial burst in growth following the 2007/8 GFC. In the UK, year-on-year money TMS growth has fallen to zero, while the broader measure M4 has declined by 3.5% over the past year. In the euro area, year-on-year growth of money TMS stands at 3.4% as of June which is an interim high actually, as even lower growth was observed throughout 2011.

Euro area money supply growth and ECB credit – another example of a central bank 'pushing on a string' – click for better resolution.

Presumably at least some people at the central banks must be aware of this and are likely thinking about ways to counter it. After all, deflation is thought to be 'bad'. The BoE is introducing a scheme in concert with the treasury that is designed to spur lending to businesses by allowing the banks to discount corporate loans with the central bank.

The ECB is mulling various other methods of prodding banks into increasing their inflationary lending. Among the measures considered is the lowering of the deposit rate into negative territory, this is to say imposing a penalty rate for holding excess reserves with the central bank. The lowering of the deposit rate to zero at the last ECB meeting was apparently only the first step, but it has already shown why this method probably won't work.

The banks have simply transferred excess reserves to their current accounts in the euro system. This combines operational flexibility with the same degree of safety, while from an interest rate standpoint the situation is the same: they get zero. Investors are even prepared to endure penalty rates of varying sizes by lending short term funds to certain governments such as Germany's and Switzerland's at negative interest rates. They pay a small price for perceived 'safety', while at the same time placing a bet on eventual currency appreciation.

Note also that excess reserves are the equivalent of cash assets to the banks. If the central bank imposes a negative interest rate on such holdings, and e.g. imposes a limit on the amounts that can be held in the current account facility, the banks may simply begin to hoard vault cash. While this is inconvenient, there is no legal impediment to such an operation. We would certainly see an increase in the money supply then, as the currency component would climb, but if this money is simply put into vaults to gather dust, then it may as well sit on the ECB's deposit facility – this is to say it would have to be considered as remaining outside of the economy. This would change only if depositors became nervous about the euro's future purchasing power and began to withdraw money in order to spend it before it loses its value.

The latest proposal – which to be sure is not new, but was hitherto considered 'DOA' – was voiced by Austrian central bank governor and member of the ECB council Ewald Nowotny, who appears to be warming to the idea to give the planned ESM bailout facility a banking license. This would allow the bailout vehicle to function as the ECB's 'QE' arm, as it could for instance buy the bonds of Spain and Italy, and then rediscount them with the central bank and pyramid new loans atop the ones it can extend by using its own capital.

Bloomberg reports:

“European Central Bank council member Ewald Nowotny said there are arguments in favor of giving Europe’s rescue fund a banking license, reviving the debate on bolstering its firepower as leaders face the prospect of a full- scale Spanish bailout.

“I think there are pro arguments for this,” Nowotny, who heads Austria’s central bank, said in an interview in his office in Vienna yesterday. “There are also other arguments, but I would see this as an ongoing discussion,” he said, adding he’s “not aware of specific discussions within the ECB at this point.”

Granting a banking license to Europe’s permanent bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism, would give it access to ECB lending, easing concerns that its 500 billion-euro ($602.5 billion) cash pot won’t be enough if Spain or Italyrequire aid. While ECB President Mario Draghisaid on May 24 that such a move amounts to the central bank financing governments, which is prohibited by European Union law, publicly-owned credit institutionssuch as the European Investment Bankare exempt.

“It is not something that is only in the field of monetary policy, so this is part of a broad discussion,” Nowotny said. He declined to elaborate.”

(emphasis added)

In other words, even though Mario Draghi asserts that giving the ESM a banking license would contravene the prohibition of central bank funding of governments, there is already an example of a publicly-owned, EU-run institution that indeed has such a license. To be sure, the EIB does not buy government securities, but it lends not only to businesses in the EU, it also supports government sponsored investments.

We conclude from the above that the debate over the banking license for the ESM is not quite dead yet – it was merely in a state of temporary catatonia. The rather non-committal sounding mentioning of the possibility by Nowotny was enough to shave nearly 40 basis points off Spain's 10 year government bond yield within minutes. It is quite possible that this was a 'trial balloon' to see how the markets would react. One must not forget, the things that are fed to the mainstream media are rarely unplanned off-the-cuff remarks, there is quite often a definitive aim behind them.

Spain's 10 year government bond yield, a weekly candlestick chart. The long upper shadow was produced in intraday trading on Wednesday; yields had initially shot up to 7.73%, but then closed at 7.36% – click for better resolution.

Addendum: A Few Interesting Charts

Below are a few charts we have come across that we believe our readers may find interesting. UK GDP fell rather unexpectedly sharply, and the pound fell with it. Recent food price increases have yet to spark the interest of a wider swathe of the internet population. Germany's business confidence is in steep decline and lastly, gold looks like it may break higher in dollar terms soon.

The intraday move in the British pound after the release of GDP data showing a rather severe contraction on Wednesday – click for better resolution.

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19 Responses to “Central Banks Are Chomping At the Bit”

We all have premises about the FED and central banking in general. If you reverse engineer all their actions, the FED has supported a process that takes gold as money (with fixed value) where more liquidity requires more gold and brought it full circle to the point that gold has been/is/will be remonetized, but in REAL-TIME. The only way to create the reasonably smooth transition of debt-money to asset-money is by way of the market. Gold cannot be remonetized and brought into the market by way of a top-down process. It must be organic for the sake of rate-of-change. It’s an ongoing process like an elephant in the room that nobody sees. The ultimate purpose of the USD is that of a real-time measure, a servant to real-time gold-as-money. The dollar’s role since 1971, as a currency, has been nothing but a stop-gap measure until such time that the market would evolve the system back to one based on gold-as-money but in REAL-TIME. REAL-TIME is key to all of this. Some evils are necessary in “the script” and the bankers have filled those staged positions extremely well. It’s a tough job as they say. For the record, I’m a strong advocate of gold as money, but realize that its liquidity has historically sucked because of fixed values placed upon it. Now that gold floats, Gresham’s Law is actually reversing. GL was predicated on fixed values on gold. The fixed peg has been the historical problem….. not the bullion. The “fullness of time” has offered much. You cannot pour new wine into old wineskins …. so true

Guys it’s time to crow up, common sense is in short supply. There is no marked because, they for them self told you, that they will intervene in the so called ´´marked´´
(The Working Group on Financial Markets (also, President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, the Working Group, and colloquially the Plunge Protection Team) was created by Executive Order 12631,[1] signed on March 18, 1988 by United States President Ronald Reagan.)
That’s by ´´DEFINITION´´ no marked there. If the stock market is a fraud, so is the debt the precious metals and the oil market tooooo.
Guys ,there are a bunch of ´´specialist criminals´´ working for the elite and they put in ´´the prices for everything´´ in the computer and tell you there is a mechanism for price finding´´ it’s a fraud, a joke´´ . Please all you stock analyst and commentators go home you are making a joke out of yourself. Get real, nobody did make any money since 41 years at least, because everybody lives in a time where they just put on more and more debt . How can anybody believe there will be a happy end.

Thank you! My mind is hungrily looking forward for some big chunk of tought food re: what happened thursday and friday. I’m really appalled about market reaction to nothing, nada, niente – unless there was something hidden behind the curtains.
If i can reserve two rows of the incoming post for a specific question I’m wondering about since 2010…well, we know that treaties and mrs. Merkel don’t allow to print. But let’s assume that the printing will occur anyway by BCE, maybe even with the consent of Germany. What will happen next? Is it possible that this will buy another 2-5 (?) years for Europe, like Bernanke did in the US? This will end in apocalyptic crash or japan-likezombieland?
Many thanks,

I was wondering about the rally also , and if Spain and Italy’s short ban came into it :

“Boehmer et al. (2009) document large price increases for banned stocks upon announcement of the ban, followed by gradual decreases during the ban period. Yet they recognise that the correlation with the ban could be spurious, as the prices of US financial stocks could have been affected by the accompanying announcement of the US bank bail-out program…”

“If the Fed were to increase everyone’s money holdings pro rata by the exact same percentage on the same day, then it would be clear to all that it would make no difference – nobody would be any richer, and merchants would raise all prices by this exact percentage on that very day.”

Not quite so simple maybe.

All outstanding contracts (i.e debt) would be set normally at the old value .

So, as an example , someone originally earning 1 and paying back 100 , if money holdings increased 100% , would be free of his debt after 50 payments of 2 , not 100 payments of 1 . We might say one year instead of two .

Someone originally earning 50 and paying back 100 , by the same increase , would be free of his debt immediately , assuming the rise occurred on the day he was to pay .

So we enter a time warp, leaving the passengers at different stops along the way and with unknown result … or alternatively they would both choose to refinance their debt to 200 and pay over the original timeframe.

Maybe the simplest pro rata % increase as an example would be to add a zero to every bill , account or contract . It would be stimulating , from computer programmers , to pencil makers, to the chat section of the Tinsdale Post … all would be go , and gone would be the days of gauging by memory how much anything was actually supposed to be worth , or even bothering to do so . Instead people would be speculating on how nice a price might look if they ever chose to next use Pi as a coefficient of increase.

No worries – was not questioning your message . Maybe the main point is that ANY adjustment to the money supply would have some non-neutral effect , being otherwise for any reason and there would be no ‘point’ whatsoever . I placed the previous message more for those thinking of debt jubilees, or that might have the idea that there is some simple arithmetic to square the circle. There isn’t, unless you are prepared to readjust a swathe of current understanding in all fields. Ironically the understandings I am talking about will adjust anyway, they always evolve , maybe the more important point is one of damage control , to try to limit monetary manipulation , to interpret it for what it is, and try to describe its effects in the wider context (which is not easy) .

About the curious gap that has opened up between agricultural prices versus Google searches for ‘food inflation’…with record numbers of people on food stamps, could it be that folks stopped caring about food inflation any more?

“Such increases in stock prices are seen as a spur to spending, as the perceived wealth of stockholders increases.”

Bernanke does not grasp that times have changed. IMO, for the “wealth effect” to take place a positive social move with low unemployment and confidence one’s employment situation (current position or ability to get obtain one) is necessary for this to take place. So, what BB wants wrt employment as a consequence of pushing the market higher is in fact a prerequisite.

Folks also now realize that the market can take back what took a year or more to make in a matter of weeks. The double whammy with that is the knowledge that real estate can go down and has. Times and attitudes have changed but he hasn’t and won’t realized it. All he knows is his approach isn’t working like the models and past experiences say it would.

Another factor working against Bernanke is how the average person, whose only experience in the stock market consists of throwing money into a mutual fund, typically via an IRA or 401K, thinks about how they are “doing” in the market. These folks do not have a correct view of the stock market, something that was reinforced to me once again a couple weeks ago while talking to a neighbor. He is close to retirement and mentioned that he was “still down $22,000.” It later hit me that what he was most likely referring to was that he was down $22,000 from the highest point his account had ever been.

This, of course, is not the correct way to view stock market returns. It would be akin to a trader thinking he had “lost money” because he did not sell the top (many bad traders do think this way). But this thinking is real as I have encountered it before. I just hadn’t considered its impacts on peoples’ mindsets and financial comfort level. I wonder how many of them are hoping to just “get even” and get out of the market.

Better yet, May 19, 2008, the SPX hit an interday high of 1440. July 21, 1998, it hit 1190. We are now 14 years past that date, yet only 170 points higher, despite a good part of that time, the Fed doing all it can to inflate the market. What was supposed to be 10% a year, hasn’t made 15% in 14 years sans dividends. It would be time for a new bull, if the old bull hadn’t been so extremely overvalued, due to wood on the fire from a speculative mania fueled by inflation from the GSE’s and the non bank financials. History had placed a 3% minimum on dividends on the entire SPX. We are not back there yet, though it could be said we are if you count stock buybacks. Buybacks don’t count, because those that hold the stock don’t receive them, but instead must maintain a bet on future growth with the capital to fuel future growth paid out.

The point of May 19, 2008 is to demonstrate Red’s point that it takes very little time to lose your ass in stocks. Proponents will say they made X since the bottom, but who got in on the bottom other than those with access to credit to buy when they knew the Fed would put up money and the Congress would agree to allow fiction to exist as balance sheets. Most people either never got in or never got out. 10 months took out the entire gain that is raved about from the bottom, which has now taken close to 3.5 years. Europe is being faulted for the failure to progress from here, but the real culprit is a broken US credit bubble, the same that floated the economies around the world. The one bubble that can be floated is a liquid one, being inflated by those that have first access to credit.

Yes, perceptions have changed enormously. Goosing the stock market no longer translates into ‘wealth effect’ driven consumption so easily. I keep thinking that another shoe is waiting to drop, and your story about the neighbor who says he’s now ‘down $22 K’ confirms it indirectly.
People actually don’t know what a real bear market is like. They know in Japan perhaps, and in Greece and some other peripheral European markets, but not yet in the US. It is merciless, a drip-drip-drip to prices no-one thought possible. Quick crashes that are subsequently erased again by a few years of gains are easier to stomach.

A very important statistic to follow these days I believe. It shows inter alia that foreign demand for treasury bonds has been replaced by domestic demand, with the banks only willing to lend to what they perceive to be the safest debtor (whose fate is intertwined with theirs in any case, so they probably don’t think about the potential risks much).

It appears to me they are more concerned with makiing it easier to steal than anything else. There really is a propaganda machine if more than 3% of the public above third grade level really believe the Fed has done anything other than make it easier for the thieves to get the money out of the banking system. In Europe, they still haven’t brought up, “Who is going to take the losses”? You can bet it isn’t going to be the politically connected.

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Obviously, this very bad Indian has way too much cash. Just look at him, he looks suspicious!
Photo via thenewsminute.com
In fact, as our friend Jayant Bhandari has pointed out, fresh avenues for corruption ...

A Brief Recap
India's Prime Minister announced on 8th November 2016 that Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 banknotes will no longer be legal tender. Linked are Part-I, Part-II, Part-III, and Part-IV, which provide updates on the rapidly encroaching police state
Expect a continuation of new social engineering notifications, each sabotaging wealth-creation, confiscating people’s wealth, and tyrannizing those who refuse to be a part of the herd, in the process destroying the very backbone of the...

Bad Monday
Some Monday mornings are better than others. Others are worse than some. For one Amazon employee, this past Monday morning was particularly bad.
No doubt, the poor fellow would have been better off he’d called in sick to work. Such a simple decision would have saved him from extreme agony. But, unfortunately, he showed up at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters and put on a public and painful display of madness.
Good-bye cruel world! On this our planet,...

Free Money!
BALTIMORE – Last week, the Dow punched up above 19,000 – a new all-time record. And on Monday, the Dow, the S&P 500, the Nasdaq, and the small-cap Russell 2000 each hit new all-time highs. The last time that happened was on the last day of December 1999.
Ironically, two events that were almost universally expected to trigger large stock market declines were followed by quite rapid and strong gains. Would the market have fallen if Hillary Clinton had won...

A Major Crisis
Last week Jayant Bhandari related the story of the overnight ban of certain banknotes in India under cover of “stamping out corruption” (see Gold Price Skyrockets In India after Currency Ban Part 1 and Part 2 for the details).
Banned 500 rupee banknotes
The problem is inter alia that the sudden ban of these banknotes has hit the Indian economy quite hard, given that 97% of all transactions in the country are cash-based. Not only that, it has...

Permanently Skewed
TRUMP HOTEL, New York – Trump’s rambling army – professionals, amateurs, camp followers, and profiteers – is marching south, down the I-95 corridor. There, on the banks of the Potomac, it will fight its next big battle.
Lieutenants in Trump's army: Bannon, Flynn & Sessions
Photo credit: Drew Angerer / AFP
Here at the Diary, we do not like to get involved in politics. But this is a special time in the history of our planet – a...

Stumped by the Bust
In the slump of a cycle, businesses that were thriving begin to experience difficulties or go under. They do so not because of firm-specific entrepreneurial errors but rather in tandem with whole sectors of the economy. People who were wealthy yesterday have become poor today. Factories that were busy yesterday are shut down today, and workers are out of jobs.
What has caused the bust? The modern-day economic orthodoxy continues to be unable to provide...

A Strong First Half of the Year, Followed by Another Retreat
In early 2016 gold had a big bull run. The precious metal rose close to 25% this year, pushed higher in a summer rally that peaked on July 10th. Gold experienced a bumpy ride over the remainder of the summer though, as investors became increasingly concerned about a potential rate hike by the Federal Reserve. Uncertainty returned to gold market and has intensified further since then.
Initially, gold rallied sharply...

The Trump Trade
After 35 years of waiting... so many false signals... so often deceived... so often disappointed... bond bears gathered on rooftops as though awaiting the Second Coming. Many times, investors have said to themselves, “This is it! This is the end of the Great Bull Market in Bonds!”
The long bond's long cycle – red rectangles indicate when the post 1980 bull market was held to be “over” or “over for sure” or “100% over”, etc. We have...

A Very Odd Growth Spurt in the True Money Supply
The growth rates of various “Austrian” measures of the US money supply (such as TMS-2 and money AMS) have accelerated significantly in recent months. That is quite surprising, as the Fed hasn't been engaged in QE for quite some time and year-on-year growth in commercial bank credit has actually slowed down rather than accelerating of late. The only exception to this is mortgage lending growth - at least until recently. Growth in...